


Truths That He Learned

by GingerItt



Category: Glee
Genre: Character Death, Cutting, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-11
Updated: 2013-10-11
Packaged: 2017-12-29 03:30:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1000350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GingerItt/pseuds/GingerItt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>5.03 reaction fic from Mike Chang’s POV, focusing on Tina and how she deals with things. (warning for references to self-harm/cutting and character death)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Truths That He Learned

Mike Chang loves his friends but there has always been one thing that bothered him to no end. He hates how they habitually trivialize Tina’s feelings. He is guilty of it, too, and perhaps that was worse because he knew her better than all of them. No one else knew except for Artie, who had found out by accident when they when they had dated.

And it was Artie that told him to keep an eye on her.

When he arrives at school a few weeks after the funeral, he breathes a sigh of relief when she rounds the corner. She’s still wearing black, which isn’t really surprising. Tina internalizes her pain because quite frankly, she’d learned to do that. Yes, she was notorious for crying at the drop of a hat, but the tears were just a physical release. No one ever stopped to wonder if she was actually okay after the tears fell.

But it’s the fact that her dress is sleeveless that makes Mike relax a bit.

*

He remembered the first time he saw them. They had been together for about six months and he had been perfectly content with their physical relationship because nothing was like being with Tina. They got each other off but Tina was reluctant to remove her clothes which he thought was a little strange but he didn’t pressure it even though he was desperate to feel her skin.

A couple of weeks before Valentine’s Day, they were laying on his bed, legs tangled together and breath stuttering against one another’s mouths. His shirt was on the floor and his pants were undone, shoved down around his hips. Tina’s hand was working up and down his length as he rubbed his fingers over her underwear in the slow circles he knew drove her crazy. He had her dress bunched up around her hips and her tights are on the floor with his shirt. And her legs--God, her amazing legs, were hitched over his hip and pulling closer.

It was an accident. 

He pulled his fingers from her and gripped the curve of her hip, grinding against her and making her gasp. He did it again, thinking it was a gasp to mean she liked it (they’d done that before and it had blown both of their minds) but instead of clinging to him and sucking at his neck, she pushed him off her and ran out of the room. Mike sat there, wondering what had gone wrong when he saw it. 

A stripe of bright red blood on the pad his thumb.

At first he thought that maybe she had started her period but his thumb hadn’t been anywhere near there. The last thing he’d touched with it was her hip. As the realization struck him, he felt his entire body go numb.

“Tina?” he called out, pulling his shirt on and going out into the hall. The bathroom door was shut and he could hear her crying behind it. He tried the knob but it was locked. “Tina, please talk to me,” he begged. She didn’t reply, just continued to sob. All he could do was wait. He wasn’t about to leave her so he sat on the floor, waiting as patiently as he could. “I’ll be right here whenever you’re ready.”

It was one of the longest hours of Mike Chang’s life, sitting on the floor and waiting for Tina to come out. He stared at the dried mark on his thumb, knowing what it meant but incredibly terrified and confused by it. When she did open the door, she had taken her dress off and slipped on the worn flannel robe he wore Sunday mornings when his mom made brunch. The belt was tied securely around her waist and she clutched the lapels of it to hide her chest. Her dress was wadded up in her hand and all her make up had been washed away.

“I--I have to show you something,” she said wetly. He got up and moved to kiss her forehead but she inched away from him. “Not yet. I--um--come on.” They went back to his bedroom and she asked him to sit on his bed. Mike watched as she double checked to make sure the door was locked and yanked his curtains shut before laying her dress over his desk chair. 

“Tina, you don’t have to do any--”

“I want to.” She gulped, coming to stand in the center of his room. “I--I trust you, Mike and I love you.”

“I love you, too.” They’d only said it a handful of times at that point and the words were still special and foreign on their tongues.

She smiled softly at him but he can see the tears beginning to form in her eyes again. “It’s--it’s--I don’t--I don’t deal well with things. Especially emotional stuff. Because, well, no one ever cared before.” Tugging at the knot of the belt, she moved a bit closer to him but still out of arm’s reach. “Please don’t say anything or ask me to explain--because I can’t, not really.”

He nodded, balling his hands into fists. The dig of his nails in his skin kept him grounded. It was hard not to tell her to stop, that she doesn’t need to do this but he knew that it wasn’t for him. The belt fell limp and Tina let the robe hang open, still wearing her underwear underneath. She ducked her head, letting her long dark hair hide her face as she shrugged the robe off, letting it pool at her feet.

In all the ways he’d imagined seeing Tina in just her bra and panties for the first time, he’d never thought it would be like that. With her hiding behind her hair and his room completely silent as he forced himself to look at her. To see what she had so desperately hidden from him until he found one by mistake and she could no longer keep it a secret. Her sides were covered in thin, lightly colored lines that started at her hips and continued up and ending in a few marks on the insides of her arms. She shook as she stood there, exposed and he couldn’t not do something. He strode over to her, wrapped his arms around her and held her as tightly as he dared.

She told him later that she had expected him to dump her right then and there but, obviously, he hadn’t. Instead, he held her and they both cried. It was odd, to feel them under his hands. If he could have willed them away he would have. She squirmed away, nodding as if to tell him to tell him that it was okay and he knelt in front of her, taking a long, hard look. Most of them were old, some were barely visible, and there were a few that were brilliant red. Maybe a few days old at the most. He wracked his brain, trying to remember what had happened in the past week. 

“It’s… no one ever cares. They see me cry and think it’s done but--no one ever seems to wonder why--”

Mike nodded, running his thumb over a long one along her ribcage. It was healed but the skin was a shining white. Thousands of questions ran through his mind but he didn’t ask any of them. This wasn’t about him. This was about Tina trusting him enough to admit something so personal to him. So he didn’t tell her that she was beautiful or that she was better than that even though he knew she was.

Instead, Mike focused kissing each scar, no matter how faded it was. At few times he found one that was longer than the others or obviously deeper and he had to stop and hug her as his own tears slid down his cheeks. A particularly wide but small one under her arm made him tremble and hold her for a long time. He had no idea if that was the right thing to do in that situation, he’d never dealt with something like that before. All he could do was try and do what he would want if their roles were reversed.

When it was time to take her home, he helped her into her dress, sliding the side zipper up for her, hiding her marks. “Can you promise me something?” he asked as he watched her pick up her tights and begin to untwist them.

“Mike,” she said, her voice sounding broken, “I can’t promise that--”

“No, I know.” And it broke his heart that he couldn’t ask that. “But can you promise that if you--if you are--I mean, if you need to--call me. Anytime. I won’t try to talk you out of it but I will listen to you. I’ll come over if I can or we can webchat but--I’m not going to lie to you, this scares the shit out of me.”

“Mike--”

“I’m in love with you.”

“No ‘but’?” she asked as she slipped her shoes on. 

“No. No ‘but’.”

*

Now, he watches her move in a daze through the hallway. She’d called him almost as soon as she’d found out, her voice broken and wrecked as she sobbed out the words that took the breath from him. 

The first week he was in Chicago, he was still getting used to the buses and trains and figuring out how to get where he was going. After a grueling class one night, he’d climbed on a bus heading north to go home and the driver hit the brakes as they rounded a corner and Mike’s body had been tossed like a limp doll into a support pole, knocking the wind out of him.

That’s what it felt like when Tina told him.

They’d talked for hours, crying together as he threw a few things into a bag and booked a plane ticket home to Ohio. She’d picked him up at the airport early the following morning and they went back to her house and just held each other. It didn’t matter that they weren’t together anymore. He held her close, her head resting on his chest, because he needed her just as much as she needed him at that moment.

When she had gone several months without--he still couldn’t bring himself to even think the word--she’d give him the small box she kept her...things in. It was light wood stained purple with a carving in a floral pattern that showed the true color of the wood. A few days later, he’d driven them out to the river and stopped at a bridge, offering her the box. He gave her the option, he could keep them or she could drop in the river. The wooden box fell with a splash into the water and they drove home, hands linked the entire way.

But he kept noticing her glance at another wooden box high on her bookshelf and he knew exactly what was in it.

They sat together at the funeral and sobbed in Tina’s car in the cemetery parking lot afterward. And he never mentioned the box.

Now he’s back in Lima for the glee club’s memorial and she’s avoiding him. She hasn’t called him since she dropped him off at the airport and she rarely answers his texts or calls. Artie texts him to tell him that he’s worried about her but she shut him out as well. He’d found her supplies when they were together but never confronted her about it. He hadn’t known how to.

He tries not to press the issue. But he purposely sits near her in the choir room and finds out through the grapevine that she went to see the guidance counselor though he doubts it did any good. Tina has a knack for talking about her problems in a way that sounds superficial to people that aren’t willing to dig deeper.

The moment he sees Rachel and how carefully put together she is, he knows Tina won’t make it through the afternoon without breaking down. His heart aches for Rachel, he can’t imagine what she’s going through but she’s tough. She’s fragile right now but she’s still the strongest of them all. This is something that could easily break most people but there she is. Front and center. Where she belongs and baring her soul to them. 

He couldn’t have done it.

When Rachel speaks so tenderly about him he senses Tina curl into herself and when she begins to sing he sees Artie’s hand reach out and touch her knee out of the corner of his eye. It’s only then that he dares to tear his eyes away from Rachel and look at their hands and he sees the nail marks on her knee. She has a hand over his, gripping like a lifeline. Mike places a hand on tops of hers and she instantly wraps her free arm around his as she cries.

Later, in the privacy of her room, she brings down the box to hand it to him. It’s a darker wood this time, with a geometric inlaid design on its lid. He says nothing because there is nothing to say, just nods and sets it aside before pulling her into his lap. He won’t say that he’s disappointed because he knows that it won’t help anything.

“I didn’t use them,” she says, gulping for air as he smooths her hair. “I just--I needed the option these past few weeks.”

“It’s okay if you did.” He holds her close, breathing a sigh of relief. He can’t bear the thought of her hurting her self. They lay together, much like they had the day he had accidentally found out about her scars but they don’t kiss at all. “Tina,” he begins, twirling a strand of her hair around his finger. Her hair has always been beautiful. “I--I still--I’m still in love with you.”

“Mike--you’re dad--”

“I don’t care,” he says a little more fiercely than he intends. He scoots closer to her and tilts her face up. “Supporting me and my decisions means nothing if he’s not supporting all my decisions. Not just dance. But you. You are my decision and if he can’t handle that, then screw him.”

She is shaking in his arms as she surges up to kiss him for the first time since they broke up. “I’m still in love with you, too,” she says against his lips.

Mike knows that there will be good days and bad days and days where she won’t be able to hand him her box, no matter what is inside it, but he wants all of them. If the days are numbered, he wants as many as he can get and he wants them with Tina.


End file.
